Typical analog CCTV systems for surveillance and security systems, for example those in office buildings, industrial facilities, military bases, schools, commercial malls or airports, are comprised of tens and sometimes hundreds of individual cameras distributed around the facility. Each of these cameras records events that take place within a predefined region of interest and transmits images to a central control station where they are monitored and analyzed.
During the configuration/reconfiguration stage of such a system operating settings for each of the camera must be individually set.
In analog surveillance systems these settings must be entered on location for each of the cameras, which in practice means that the initial installation and configuration stage of the system must be carried out by trained personnel. This combined with the time necessary to individually set the settings for each camera significantly increases the initial cost of the system. After the initial configuration of the system occasional updates in the settings of some or all of the cameras have to be made. In prior art systems this means that a technician must be sent to the location of each camera in order to make the required changes increasing the maintenance and operating cost of the system.
An improvement on the analog systems described above is achieved by basing the CCTV system on Internet Protocol (IP) technology that enables configuration/reconfiguration to be done over an IP network directly from the central control station. In prior art IP based CCTV systems the initial configuration and later reconfiguration of the settings of the cameras is still a relatively time consuming task since the IP configuration system is installed in the central control station and each camera must be individually addressed and programmed. In addition the setup process is prone to errors as a result of the repetitive work of having to access each of the cameras in the system separately and manually inserting the data using the input device, e.g. keyboard, at the control station.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for simplifying the configuration/reconfiguration of the settings in CCTV surveillance and security systems.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and system that reduces the number of errors and provides increased integrity of the data during the process of configuring/reconfiguring the settings in CCTV surveillance and security systems.
Further purposes and advantages of this invention will appear as the description proceeds.